Free Republic

Judge Scott McAfee said his long-awaited ruling on the effort to disqualify Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis "should" come out Friday. “I made a promise to everybody. These kind of orders take time to write. I need to make sure I say exactly what I want to, and I plan to stick to the timeline I gave everyone,” McAfee said, according to ABC affiliate WSB who spoke to him Thursday evening. “Should be out tomorrow,” he continued. Attorneys for several defendants have been pushing for the disqualification of Willis from the Georgia election interference case against former President Donald...

The US Supreme Court on Tuesday responded to President Trump’s emergency application requesting the high court pause the immunity ruling in Jack Smith’s January 6 case in DC. Chief Justice Roberts on Tuesday responded to Trump’s emergency request and told Special Counsel Jack Smith he has a week to respond. The Supreme Court gave Jack Smith until Tuesday, February 20 to file a response to Trump’s request to pause the appellate court’s ruling on immunity. Last week a federal appeals court stacked with Biden judges denied Trump immunity in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s January 6 DC case. The three-judge panel...

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union” that she was not ruling out running for president. Anchor Jake Tapper said, “Donald Trump is likely to be the next Republican presidential nominee, and he has a decent shot being elected the next president. It could happen. What would a second Donald Trump term look like?”

It was a given when a judge ruled against Donald Trump on the suit that New York State Attorney General Letitia James filed, alleging that Trump defrauded banks to obtain loans. The ruling revealed two interesting and important things about how leftists and their fellow travelers use the legal system and about the ideological corruption of leftist judges. It goes without saying that the verdict was a joke. The claim was that Trump lied to lenders to get better loan terms. Interestingly, none of the lenders complained, and Trump paid back every penny. More than that, commercial lenders have a...

A federal appeals court on Friday ordered a new sentence for a North Carolina man who pleaded guilty to a petty offense in the Capitol riot — a ruling that could impact dozens of low-level cases in the massive Jan. 6, 2021 prosecution. The appeals court in Washington said James Little was wrongly sentenced for his conviction on a misdemeanor offense to both prison time and probation, which is court-ordered monitoring of defendants who are not behind bars. Little, who entered the Capitol but didn't join in any destruction or violence, pleaded guilty in 2021 to a charge that carries...

From the hardscrabble hills of western Pennsylvania to the hardknock blocks of Northeast Philadelphia, children are getting inferior educations in underfunded school districts with low property values and incomes. Crowded classrooms in the state’s 100 most poorly funded districts deny children, who may enter kindergarten a year behind their more affluent peers, the attention they need. Those districts, including South Allegheny, East Allegheny, New Castle, Sharon and Philadelphia, educate one-third of the state’s 1.5 million students, two-thirds of its Black students, and nearly 60% of its poor students. Leaky roofs, obsolete and unsafe buildings, and broken laptops plague many of...

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) must provide the state of Florida with documentation on why it supports gender transitions for minors and any communication with its members about that decision-making process, a District Court ruled. The AAP is involved in a lawsuit against Florida over a new rule established last year that prohibits the use of Medicaid funds on sex changes and other transgender-related care. The AAP signed on in support of the plaintiffs, leading Florida to subpoena it and numerous other organizations for information on their policies toward individuals with gender dysphoria and how those policies were developed,...

The Florida Supreme Court has upheld a law that forbids local governments from restricting sales of guns and ammunition beyond state law. In a 4-1 ruling, the court said local officials could face stiff penalties if they try to enforce the restrictions that go beyond the Florida law. Florida passed a law in 1987 the stated local cities and counties could not have restrictions on guns that were more restrictive than the state's, law. "It is not a core municipal function to occupy an area that the Legislature has preempted, and local governments have no lawful discretion or authority to...

Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s deadline for the Biden administration to respond to his request that they cancel an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) proposal passed on Wednesday, and he now plans to take action to protect the nation’s gasoline supply himself. The proposed regulations take aim at the Permian Basin, the largest oil field in the United States, accounting for 95,000,000 gallons of gasoline per day or 40% of the oil produced domestically, according to the Texas Governor’s Office. Abbott claimed that the EPA’s proposal would further raise gas prices for consumers when fuel already costs more than $5 per gallon...

The Supreme Court on Thursday curbed the Environmental Protection Agency’s options for limiting greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants, one of the most important environmental decisions in years.

From the Comments: epd150, 8 hours ago ZERO evidence of Constitutional right to abortion! BOOM ... Thank you Lord Jesus ---- GDPops, 9 hours ago "We The People..." Does not mean, "We The Court." The constitution is the basis for the law of our land. ---- Hellsbane, 9 hours ago Its not only a transfer of power from the courts to the people its also a transfer of power from the Central government, of which the court is 1/3rd of, to the people and states respectively! ---- wewillnotcomply, 9 hours ago its really this simple the constitution gives us the...

Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered a blistering rebuke on Monday night of a draft ruling to overturn the landmark 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade. The draft ruling, published by Politico, was authored by Justice Samuel Alito and concludes by declaring that Roe and the court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey have no grounding in the Constitution. The court is expected to issue an actual ruling in the case in the next two months.

In the 21st century, other elite criteria seem to count as much as the old markers of lineage, money, and location. “Certification,” defined as degrees from the “right” undergraduate and graduate schools, is essential for an elite resumé. Such brands have little to do with education per se or aggregate knowledge acquired. (It is not clear that an Ivy League student would do better on the same SAT, taken upon graduation as earlier, upon admittance). Are our best generals those with Yale degrees, and our best CEOs those with Stanford MBAs? And are Harvard Law Review editors—think Barack Obama, the...

Denying natural immunity in the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Service (CMS) vaccine mandates is “unprecedented in modern history,” a prominent public health expert said. Dr. Scott Atlas, a former White House COVID-19 Task Force adviser during the Trump administration, made the remarks after the U.S. Supreme Court (SCOTUS) decide to uphold the CMS vaccine mandates in a Thursday ruling. He told The Epoch Times that the ruling is “another serious denial of scientific fact” specifically mentioning the denial of natural immunity in CMS vaccine mandates.

WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court turned down emergency requests by New York healthcare workers for a religious exemption from state requirements to vaccinate against Covid-19. A federal appeals court in New York previously denied the workers’ requests. The court denied the requests in brief written orders. As is typical for such emergency actions, the majority didn’t explain its thinking. Three conservative justices—Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch—said they would have allowed the exemptions. In October, the court denied a similar application from Maine healthcare workers seeking exemption from their state’s vaccination requirements, which lower courts had rejected. The same three conservatives...

National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases director Dr. Anthony Fauci said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that the Supreme Court ruling that religious gatherings cannot be restricted in New York State was a “considerable risk for acquisition and spread” of the coronavirus pandemic. Guest host Martha Raddatz said, “The Supreme Court struck down New York’s COVID restrictions on religious gatherings in the state. How concerned are you about legal challenges to pandemic restrictions going forward?

Raleigh, N.C. — Judge Amy Coney Barrett is expected to be sworn in as a U.S. Supreme Court justice shortly after the U.S. Senate confirms her nomination on Monday night, and a North Carolina case could be among the first before the court with her as a member. Absentee ballots have been the focus of a fierce legal fight in North Carolina for weeks, following the State Board of Elections' decision to try to settle some lawsuits by changing the rules for voting by mail. While courts have dealt with the problem of fixing ballots that were mailed without the...

While several federal courts have recently issued decisions addressing the constitutionality of various stay-at-home orders, few state courts have done so. That changed late yesterday, when the Supreme Court of Wisconsin issued its much-anticipated decision in the state legislature’s challenge to Democratic governor Tony Evers’s “safer-at-home” emergency order, issued by his designee for secretary of the Department of Health Services (“DHS”), Andrea Palm. Every Wisconsinite has suddenly become interested in administrative law and the workings of the high court. It is a beautiful thing. The decision found the order immediately unenforceable. The governor responded by arguing that the Republican legislature...

A North Carolina appeals court on Tuesday blocked the state’s voter identification law from going into effect, finding it was a discriminatory attempt to suppress the black vote, in a victory for Democrats and voting rights advocates. The appeals court reversed a lower court decision that denied a preliminary injunction against a law requiring voters to produce a photo ID at the polls. The ruling puts the voter ID law on hold until the underlying lawsuit challenging it is decided, likely blocking it for the November 2020 general election. The law did include a provision allowing people without proper ID...

A federal appeals court on Friday unanimously ruled that more than 200 Democratic congressional lawmakers do not have standing to sue President Trump over allegations he violated the Emoluments Clause over foreign payments to his businesses. “Because we conclude that the Members lack standing, we reverse the district court and remand with instructions to dismiss their complaint,” the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said in its ruling.